At the tail end of Season 1 of the blockbuster series Prison Break, Michael Scofield, the mastermind of the daring jailbreak, approached Sara Tancredi, the resident doctor at the Fox River State Penitentiary with a very unusual request.
“I'm asking you to make a mistake. Not hurt anyone, not steal anything, just forget to lock up. Leave the door unlocked when you leave tonight, that's it. please!” Scofield said.
“So now it's a conspiracy. This is where you're breaking out of, this room? Sara asked, alarmed.
“You're asking me to break the law,” she said.
“There are alarm contacts in the glass surrounding the door, otherwise I wouldn't need you to,” Scofield said.
After great reflection, Sara with whom Scofield had struck an intimate code, left the door to the clinic open.
That night, Scofield broke his brother Lincoln Burrows Burrows who had been sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit and six other inmates out of the maximum prison.
The script reads like one Fredrick Leliman, the mastermind of the murders of lawyer Willie Kimani, his client Josphat Mwenda and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri may have served his colleague Sylvia Wanjiku at Syokimau Police Station on June 23, 2016, the day the three disappeared.
Only that this time, it wasn’t about forgetting to lock the door, but rather, ‘forgetting’ to record the inmates in the Occurrence Book as is standard procedure.
It’s this fatal ‘mistake’ that earned Wanjiku 24 years in jail while Lelimani got the death penalty. The Second accused Stephen Cheburet got 30 while police informer Peter Ngugi got 20 years.
In the grand scheme of things, Wanjiku’s role ensured the trail of the abduction of Willie Kimani and the other deceased persons never led back to the police station, and as a result, nobody at the station would be blamed for their disappearance and eventual murders.
While convicting the four accused persons on July 22, 2022, Justice Jessie Lessit said, "I’m satisfied that there was no other reasonable hypothesis that can be made based on the evidence before me except that of guilt."
In passing their sentences on February 3, the judge gave a blow-by-blow account of how Wanjiku abetted and aided the murders.
On June 23, 2016, when Kimani, Mwenda and Muiruri left Mavoko Law Courts, they were abducted along Mombasa Road and taken to Syokimau police post where they were held for a few hours.
Wanjiku, the officer on duty on the material day, did not record them in the OB. She denied they were ever there.
But evidence adduced in court by two of her colleagues proved that she was in fact in the custody of the key to the holding cells.
“In this case, the burden shifted to the 3rd accused to explain how the deceased were held at the Post while she was on duty, without any entry in the OB; how they were placed in cells and later removed while she had custody of the keys to the cells," Justice Lessit said.
According to police, the deceased were held at the police post for a few hours before they were taken to a field and murdered. Their bodies were discovered two weeks later at Ol Donyo Sabuk River, almost 100km away.
Nonetheless, Lessit pointed out that Wanjiku rightfully exercised her right to refuse to give self-incriminating evidence as stipulated under Article 50(2) (I) of the Constitution.
As a general rule, she noted, the burden of proof rests with the prosecution as provided by the Evidence Act.
The judge was, however, quick to point out that Wanjiku had an opportunity to dissociate herself from the other co-accused by some action to show that she was not with them in the offence, but she persistently lied to investigators to cover for the killers.
“In my considered view, given the fact that the 3rd accused was the police officer manning the OB desk and also had the keys to the cells, where there was no entry in the Occurrence Book or the Cells entry made to indicate that the deceased was held at the station, she was a principal offender,” Lessit said.
“There is no way the deceased could have entered the cells without her releasing the key to open it.”
Justice Lessit explained that Wanjiku’s phone data showed that she was on duty continuously at the police station between 10.09 am and 7.30 pm and her insistence that the keys were with two of her colleagues was false.
“Being a police officer, the 3rd accused knew the importance of keeping proper and up-to-date records at the post. It ought to have occurred to her that there was an illegal and wrongful intention to secretly detain the deceased at the post the moment no entry was made in the OB,” the judge concluded.
Wanjiku became an accomplice to murder the moment she chose to make a mistake, and just like Dr Tancredi in Prison Break, she’s going to do time for agreeing to break the law.
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